← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
01:07:13
Elon Musk has been on a slash-and-burn tear through the federal government — gaining access to I.T. systems, dismantling U.S.A.I.D. and unleashing a firehose of attacks on his platform, X, accusing the bureaucracy of various conspiratorial crimes. As this all unfolds before our eyes, it’s hard to believe that Musk, not that long ago, was a conventional Obama-era liberal. How did a guy who cared about climate change and going to Mars, whose companies were buoyed by government largess, become Donald Trump’s most unapologetic soldier? What does he hope to do with all this power? What does Musk want? Kara Swisher has been reporting on Musk for decades and is one of the great tech reporters of our age. She hosts the podcasts “On With Kara Swisher” and “Pivot,” with Scott Galloway, and is the author of “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.” This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “What’s Wrong With Donald Trump?” by Ezra Klein “The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Managem...
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- [00:01]
A
Hi, it's Samantha Shea from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times. We all know those people who are simply impossible to shop for. At Wirecutter, we have a huge collection of gift guides to help you find the perfect present. We test everything we recommend, from an ice cream subscription to a back massager to a trio of succulents. We believe there's a perfect gift for everyone and Wirecutter can help you find it. Check out all our gift guides@nytimes.com giftguides.
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B
From New York Times opinion. This is the Ezra Klein Show. So at the beginning, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have ended up with a fairly narrow mandate. You can look at the Trump executive order creating it, and it says the purpose is modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. In the last couple weeks, it's become clear that Musk's role is a whole lot larger than that. Elon Musk right now involved in almost.
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A
Every agency and corner of the United States government, offering all federal employees a buyout to resign. Musk and his team have access to at least 11 agencies, and the count is growing every day. His team has gained access to something.
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Extraordinarily sensitive, the Treasury Department's payment system.
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Which handles trillions of dollars in payments.
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B
And the private information of every single.
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A
American in this country.
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B
Elon Musk seized control of usaid.
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A
People getting fired, people getting furlough in.
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B
Droves, posting on X, quote, we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. They are raiding the government. We don't pledge allegiance to the billionaires. We don't, we don't pledge allegiance to Elon Musk. And so far, at least, Musk's patron, Donald Trump seems to be on board.
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A
I think he's doing a great job. He's a smart guy, very smart, and he's very much, much into cutting the.
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B
Budget of our federal government. And as I've watched all this unfold, I've been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved in the way he has. How did he go from conventional Obama era liberal worried about climate change and who wanted to go to Mars to right wing conspiratorial meme Lord working to elect the far right in Germany and shred the federal government in the United States? What led to this transition, this evolution for Elon Musk? And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over? To talk about all this, I want to Invite Kara Swisher on the show. Kara is one of the great tech reporters of the age. She's been covering Musk for many, many years, along with many of the other tech CEOs who become such key political figures. Now she's of course, a host of the great podcasts on with Kara Swisher and Pivot, which she co hosts with Scott Galloway. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com Kara Swisher, welcome back to the show.
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A
Thank you. I've never been here, but you've been.
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B
On my show before. Yes, you have. I'm going to go back and show your seats. You were like my second ever episode.
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A
Oh, that's because I suggested you do podcasting. You've done rather well.
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B
Astros and interviewing from Kara Swisher.
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A
Wow, I must have forgotten it.
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B
I can't. It was such a seminal moment. Well, it's good to see you.
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A
Good to see you.
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B
How would you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump's second term?
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A
Well, a little more strongly than the New York Times did. They're sort of treating it like isn't an interesting person walking through. I think he's a one man wrecking ball, really. And he's being used by Trump for that purpose. There's lots of ways you could use metaphors. You could say junkyard dog. He's the one sort of taking all the flak going in and breaking things. But you could be funny and call it wreck it Ralph. I don't think it's particularly funny or the right way to do it or constitutionally sound, but that's the kind of thing he's going in there like he does with his companies and doing the exact same thing. He's got a series of moves that he makes every single time, and he's doing them writ large on the federal government.
- [04:50]
B
Walk me through the moves. What is his playbook?
- [04:53]
A
Well, it's changed and morphed over the years, but always drama, always a massive amount of drama centered on him. That tends to be the thing he does. He can be very dramatic in a very, like, poignant way. There was a period where he was very worried about the fate of Tesla, if you remember. And he was sleeping on the floor there. And he gave a really, he actually gave an interview to the New York Times where he seemed to cry. He seemed very emotional. And at one point when we were talking, this was, I think off camera, he said, if Tesla doesn't survive the human Race is doomed, which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought, wow, this is what man in his 40s who thinks that he's the center of the universe. And so it always has that element of drama. Like it has to be that and he has to be at the center. I think he's greatly informed by video games. And so that's. He's sort of. Someone described him to me as Ready Player one. And everybody else is an npc, which is a non player character. So he always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most. And sometimes he does, and sometimes he's engineer. So just like getting the founder role when he's not actually the founder or rewriting history or using PR to make himself the founder, so he understands the hero's journey kind of thing really rather well. The stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn't work, we're doomed kind of thing. So he uses language like that of doom. And he tends to overstate the problems. Most companies have problems, but everything is a disaster here and I'm here to fix it, or everything sucks. And everybody previously as criminal or evil. Pedophile's a word he likes to use a lot, but he uses the terms like evil. And in one tweet, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of Trust and Safety Twitter, who he did like until he quit and then he became evil. In one tweet, he called him evil. And I was seething with hate, which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I'm not seething with hate.
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B
Very Trumpian.
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A
Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. I think he means it, though. I think Trump sometimes is just doing it for show, you know, showman, a reality show kind of thing.
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B
So there's a story that Musk tells, this sort of dramatic story. It's him against the evildoers, but there's also mechanics. Right? He has people, lieutenants, fan out to key points. One thing we're seeing right now with what Musk is doing in the federal government is an identification of choke points of information and money. The treasury payment system, the Office of Personnel Management, which is a place where Musk has installed trusted aides. And they're using that as a way to fan out across the federal workforce. So tell me a bit beneath the story. Musk tells the grand narrative when he takes things over and what he's brought from that to the federal government, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
- [07:42]
A
Well, he has people around him that are just enablers. They're sort of all these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they're minions, they're all lesser than he is in some fashion. And they all look up to him. They're typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. You know, sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he said, people around me thought it was funny. Well, they all do, because they're like, to be in the room is to watch it happen. When he was being interviewed at Code once, he had a couple of them there and he told a really bad joke, and they all went like that. And I was like, that's not funny. I was like, I'm sorry. Did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. And what they do is it's not that hard to figure out choke points. Right? This is where we need to be. And then they go into it in this way that is violating of typical rules. And I don't mean necessarily law, although I suspect many laws may have been broken here. But not caring about breaking laws. And so they go in sort of full force and question, let me see your code. Why can't we get in? We're getting in. We have the law. We have federal marshals. Let's see what they'll do. And that is a really big quality that he has. Let's say things and wait for them to sue us or wait for them to stop us. They won't stop us. And again, very much like Trump, the people don't stop you. We just operate on a set of polite rules in society, and they just barrel right through them.
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B
I want to zoom in on that breaking of rules, because I think something Musk understands Trump has understood in different ways is that at high levels of society, the recourse for breaking a law, breaking a rule is legal. You don't get frog marched out. Typically, what happens is somebody sues you, they need to have standing. It works its way through the courts. You have lawyers as well, and it moves slowly.
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A
Right.
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B
And so a lot of law following and rule following is just a norm at that level that you follow the laws and you follow the rules. If you don't, you can move much faster than the courts are likely to move. They can fire all these people, many of them potentially illegally given civil service protections, and what they're going to sue over the course of six to nine months or four years and maybe get some back pay. Right. Corporations do this against people organizing unions all the time. But as an insight that a lot of what has constrained Other executive branches is not actually a constraint because by the time the legal system catches up, you've already achieved what you want to achieve.
- [10:08]
A
That's correct.
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B
It's a pretty profound insight.
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A
Yeah, it is. I mean, and if he gets caught, he sometimes he's willing to pay. Right? Like, he's willing to go toe to toe legally. And I think what a lot of people are, is, I don't want to fight this guy. He has unlimited money. Right. Like, you have to think twice if you're going. I mean, you know, journalists have to think twice. You know, it's very similar to these media companies settling. You know, CBS has done not wrong in this Kamala Harris situation, yet they're gonna pay. It's pretty clear that Meta did nothing wrong with Trump, and yet they're gonna pay. You do it to make it go away, or you don't do it at all because of the exhaustion. And he understands that. He understands that he can wear them down. And so it is true. If you blow lights, you mostly get away with it. Right. You don't always get caught. Or if you don't pay bills or. In his business life, let's blow up 90 rockets, because the 91st will work. And that's his attitude towards pretty much everything, I can tell.
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B
Although, to be fair to him, it led to some amazing rockets.
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A
It did. But who else gets to, like, look. And then he insults NASA, which is not allowed to blow up rockets. NASA can't blow up rockets because then they blow up one rocket, that's the end of it. Right. And so it's a real advantage to be able to blow up rockets and then keep going. You know that Thomas Edison quote, there's a famous quote that they all quote back to me. I have not failed. I've found 10,000 ways that don't work, whatever, and then you eventually get to it. And so it's very. It's part of the ethos of tech. It's that there's no such thing as failure. There's only, it didn't work that time, and I'll get the right one next.
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B
But this gets to, I think, the deeper question here, because there are all these tactics and strategies, but towards what? When he's blowing up rockets, he is trying to make rockets that work in a certain way. And eventually he did. And I think the world, frankly, is better off for him doing it. Tesla had many failures, but really did make better electric cars than anybody else made and help the electric vehicle transition happen.
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A
Sure.
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B
What does he want now, though? What Is this all in service of what is the vision, in your view, that he's trying to effectuate with all this power that he now wields in the government?
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A
It's not money. Money is not. I hate to say this, I hate it, but it's not that important to many of them. Right. You know, that it's not money. Some of them really like money, that's for sure, but it's not money. It's the power that money brings and it's power to decide. And, you know, I think it started off, I have some good ideas and I'd like to put them into place. And now it's. I have all the ideas on every topic and therefore what I say goes. It's a very king like attitude towards things. Right. Or the, you know, that philosopher they like of that. We should have a functional CEO running our country that gets to decide everything and screw Congress, screw the courts. We should have a king, essentially a CEO that has unlimited power. He also does have a really weird sense of mortality in a, in a way that he wants to be legendary. Right. Again, go back to video games. But I think he wants the glory. He has those images in his head. And that's not by way of excuse, it's by way of explanation. Right. That this is how he looks at himself, is on a grand journey of the hero. He's not a hero, by the way, let me be clear.
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B
But I think this gets at what to me is one of the mysteries of Musk, because the ideas that he seems committed to have changed. You know, Peter Thiel, who is contemporary, they co founded PayPal together. But Thiel has always been pretty far right. You go back to things he was writing at Stanford, Musk, you go back to say, the Obama era. He's a kind of standard Obama era liberal. He has a series of companies that are solving problems that are important to Obama era liberals. Those companies survive off of Obama era policies from government contracts to electric vehicle subsidies and money. Right. Loan guarantees. You know, Tesla's saved by an Obama loan guarantee.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I mean, and even in 2017, he joins an advisory board for Trump and then he gets back off of it when Trump pulls out of the Paris climate accords. So you have someone who is running public private partnerships, working endlessly with the government, working on things like climate change, and within a very compressed matter of years moves very, very far to the right. So I agree that he wants power for his ideas, but it has always been a little bit mysterious to me what led to this striking radicalization in him.
- [14:30]
A
You're right. And during Obama, he was supportive when he joined that. We texted a lot during that period. He was on the Trump thing and he was like, they're trying to do an anti gay thing. I'm gonna get in there and stop them. He was very much, I need to. To change Trump's mind, only I can change it kind of thing. He wasn't anti Trump, but he certainly wasn't pro Trump. I can tell you that. He was very much in the he's kind of a con man school of thought. With him around Covid, I saw a lot of changes, you know, around. I talked to him quite a lot, and people give me a hard time for having done that. I get it. But he wasn't that off the beaten track before. I mean, he was megalomatoniacal. He was typical of IT tech person, but doing more interesting things. But there was a real shift during COVID I noticed it. He got very upset. He got very, like, overly upset and overly dramatic. Look, if you think your company is critical for the future of the human race and then California closes it down cause of COVID you get in that mode. That's one. He sort of got very unreasonable. And in one interview I did with him, he started saying only a few thousand people or whatever, I don't remember precisely, were gonna die from COVID And he had read all the studies and he knew and I didn't. He's liked unions or the government or regulation. That goes way back for all these people. And so it became more profound during COVID this idea. I think the issues around his trans daughter seem to affected him quite profoundly. I've noticed that in a number of tech people who have trans children. The second thing I think the Wall Street Journal has correctly reported on is his use of ketamine and other drugs. So I think that was another thing that seemed to have changed him. But although I, you know, they all use drugs all the time.
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B
I know a lot of people use ketamine. They don't tend to turn that far.
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A
Correctly, Right, Correct. But I think he was doing it himself. He was like the world's expert. It was also staying up late at night. He has this weird proclivity to be up at 3 in the morning. And obsessively, he's got an obsessive personality. You know, we all have that element to us, but he's got it in spades. And the one thing that I think I keep saying this to people, and I said it at the time when Biden did not invite him to that EV summit and invited Mary Barra instead and treated him shabbily. He was very upset. Like, very. I talked to him a lot about it, or he texted me. And other people did, too. Other people noticed it too. And this was a summit that Biden had, and he couldn't invite him because of the union issues. He was very virulently anti union, so they didn't invite him. And he was very upset. Like, personally upset. Like wounded almost. And I even went as far as to call Steve Richetti, who works for Biden, and I said, boy, have you made a mistake that you should bear hug this guy. He's really mad. You know, Steve version. He's a nice guy. And he's like, oh, you know, it's the unions. He should understand. He's a big boy. And I was like, no, he's not a big boy. He's a little.
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B
The Biden people are all very relational. For them to have missed what a relational snub like this could do to somebody with his ego is. It's a mistake at the kind of politics that they were supposed to be so good at.
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A
Well, the thing is, you know, and Stu's again, a lovely guy. I actually ran into him at a movie premiere for Wicked, and he goes, guess you were right. I'm like, guess so. You know, the way he takes slights is really strange. So I'd seen it in action. Sort of petty anger and slight slights. And that one really stuck hard. And they kept. The Biden people kept tweaking him. And I found that to be a mis. You know, I mean, you could be like, so what? I'm like, why would you do that? He actually does deserve the accolades around Tesla, so why not just give him that? And I never understood why they wouldn't. Despite the union stuff, there's a factor.
- [18:06]
B
You haven't mentioned here, which is Twitter.
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A
Oh, yeah, that.
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B
So the Wall Street Journal has a piece from years ago where it just is tracking his number of tweets, year by year. 2012, 2013, 2014, you begin to see it really explode. 2016, 2017, it gets really big. 2018, and I mean, then he's really off to the races.
- [18:23]
A
Yeah.
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B
And there's a lot going on in his use of Twitter. And obviously he eventually buys Twitter and we'll talk about that. But clearly he becomes very influenced by some quite radically Right. Subcultures on Twitter. The part of Twitter he ends up falling into, whether he looks for it or just gets into it, I don't know what the chicken and the egg is here. But he doesn't become a normal Republican. He doesn't become in some ways a normal maga Republican. He's not like Steve Bannon or something.
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A
No.
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B
He falls into a sort of world of Twitter anons and, well, it started.
- [18:57]
A
Off with joking stuff like he liked all those memes. Dank memes. He loves dank memes.
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B
It's Edgar Edge. You know him so much better than I do. I don't know him very well at all, but I always felt when I left his presence a couple times I have been around it and this was years ago, before he was who he is now. I would tell people he was the smartest 15 year old boy in the world.
- [19:16]
A
Yeah, that's a very good way to put it.
- [19:18]
B
Yeah. And so he got really into the memes and this was always a real door into a dark right wing on that particular platform.
- [19:26]
A
It always is. You know, I have experiences with my own son, like he loves dank memes. Like he always sends me dank memes or whatever. And you can fall down it. And I think that's what attracted him to Twitter for sure. And then it took off into a darker place that the other things impacted it. But, you know, he's an addictive personality, clearly. Like whether it's to work or hardcore is one of his favorite words, which is I find to be hustle porn, you know, so he's attracted to addiction. And so his Twitter use, you can watch it like you can, you can see it. It's manic. And he's a manic person. And I think, again, not an excuse, but an explanation. He has a manic personality, violative.
- [20:09]
B
So there's also reality that in a way that is unusual among people of his class, he's really good at social media. Good at social media in the way young people are, not in the way Barack Obama is. Right.
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A
I don't think he's good the way my kids are cringe. They're always like, cringe. No, I don't think so.
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B
Fair enough. But there is an official voice of social media, Right. The voice Mark Zuckerberg used to have before he became an Elon Musk imitator online. So bad the voice that you would get from Obama or Bill Gates and Musk isn't in that voice. He's constantly responding to small follower accounts. And he really does build up an attentional power that he didn't have before it. He begins to really trade in this coin of attention. He loves attention he loves attention, but he uses it to drive meme coins. He begins, I think, to understand in a way other people don't, because he's experimenting with it, what you can turn attention into, right? What set him apart from sort of the other people who superficially looked like him, that made him temperamentally suited to doing that.
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A
Well, his manic nature, right? It's got a manic, addictive quality to it. And he does have a sense of humor. It's not my sense of humor, and people will hate me for saying this, but it can be rather charming, right? Like when he was on Saturday Night Live. Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works. To anyone I've offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also gonna be a chill, normal dude? He was so awkward that it was charming. And other people, again, are gonna say, Kara loves him. I don't care. Go watch it. It is just the way.
- [21:54]
B
Do you really have all these people in your life who are surprised as a reporter in town?
- [21:58]
A
Oh, my God. You brought him. You made him. Oh, yes. Oh, my God. They're so ex. I have to tell you, sometimes the left is so ridiculously censorious. It's kind of like. I don't wanna use censorious. That's not. They're just like skolish. I don't wanna use. They're not censoring. But, yes, I get a lot of. Like, you made him. Like you didn't know it. Well, I didn't know how he was treating his kid. I'm sorry, I didn't know that. And had I known, I would've also didn't make him.
- [22:21]
B
The car company was successful. Cause the cars were bad.
- [22:23]
A
I was covering him as a car manufacturer. Look, Silicon Valley is. I'm not gonna make an excuse. Silicon Valley has a million people like him. He was very typical, except he was doing more interesting things than other people to how he's good at it. I think the people that are very good. And I once wrote a column about in the Times when I was writing for the Times about two people I thought were very good, which is AOC and Trump. Right? They're genuine to themselves. Or Kim Kardashian's another person who's like this. You don't have to like any of these people, but, boy, are they good at channeling themselves as an image online. And it feels genuine. It feels like them doing it. And it is them doing it. It feels like it's their voice, if that makes sense. People love when someone that famous reacts to them and then it creates a sensation around them. Right. And so then you get a lot of acolytes. Oh my God. Elon Musk responded to me. And he feeds off of that too. And again, he combines the humor. He initially combined humor with that or insights right. To interesting things. And then it very quickly twisted into stuff he doesn't know anything about and he just pontificates. And that's his favorite thing, is to say all manner of nonsense and inaccuracies about things. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
- [23:36]
B
I remember being at code years ago and you all had Musk on the stage and he sort of talked through that. He believed in the simulation hypothesis, which is a hypothesis that you should expect that any sufficiently advanced civilization will begin running simulations of the world. There will be more simulations and there will be base realities. And so by a simple matter of arithmetic, we are likelier to be living in a simulated world than the real world. And Musk said he bought this and, and thought there was a pretty low chance we were in baseball.
- [24:05]
A
He said there's a non zero chance. And it fascinated him.
- [24:08]
B
Again, well, that's what I was going to get at. Not the simulation. I think people can make too much of whether or not that idea matters. But he has a mind, has always, I think, had a mind that is attracted to unusual ideas, that the things that most people believe are probably wrong. What you can and can't do, what isn't, isn't true. And I mean, he has been proven right a number of times in very, very big, profound ways. Now he's the richest man in the world. He the most attention in the world, right from where you start to end up there. That's gonna change your psychology. And one thing that then seems true though, is that he doesn't just get attracted to unusual ideas, but he gets more conspiratorial as I watch him on Twitter. And I'm curious how you understand that dimension of him.
- [24:53]
A
Well, you know, Kevin Roose did a great thing about that. You go down this rabbit hole, it really is. It can really be, did you know this? Or everybody is subject to it, with the way social media works and that's a mind of technology. People, they're like, this could happen. We could go to the moon, right? You have to have that element to you if you're gonna do very difficult things. And so you have to start with that personality. And therefore anything, every single thing is open to question. Why do we do it this way? Why do we do it this way? And it's a personality trait I like. But what it happens is when you start to get out to Ukraine or vaccines or whatever, they have to question everything and posit themselves. I always joke about it with my wife. Oh, yet another bold truth teller. Right? Like, I'm so tired of them. Like, I'm here to boldly tell you the truth without any actual information or reporting. And so he's attracted to that idea, like the simulation, like, why can't we live on Mars? Not everybody does that. And I think when it starts from that, it starts off from a good place. But often in the social media world, as Kevin correctly put out in that podcast he did, is it goes down into the sort of conspiracy theory avenue really quickly.
- [26:07]
B
It's a very specific kind of conspiracy theory he gets into. So you have him, you know, he responds to someone who tweets that Jews, quote, have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. And Musk replies, you have said the actual truth. In July of 2024, just before he came out in support of Trump, he accused Democrats of, quote, trying to import as many illegal voters as. And in this way, I think what is going on with him is a little bit distinct from a lot of the people who superficially have similar politics, because I think he's really bought into a lot of great replacement theory.
- [26:44]
A
Yes.
- [26:45]
B
A lot of this idea.
- [26:46]
A
So have a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Let me say he's not alone.
- [26:49]
B
No, he's not.
- [26:50]
A
He's got a cut like this Curtis Yarvin stuff. They've all sort of been taken by these. It's almost religious if you think about it. Right. And so one of the things that I think it goes back to, and I hate to say this is sad, little boy wasn't loved enough as a child, is searching for meaning, right? Searching for love, searching for. And again, not an excuse, because I think he's become a terrible person and he should get therapy. But when there's easy answers like that, oh, this is why you're so unhappy. Oh, this is why the world is the way it is. These right wing conspiracies do scratch an itch for these people. It's a religion, it's their answer to the world.
- [27:28]
B
It's also a politics. So Musk is South African. Peter Thiel spent much of his childhood in South Africa.
- [27:34]
A
David.
- [27:34]
B
Sadly, David Sacks is South African. And there's a very distinctive experience to being somebody, you know, born in or who lived in South Africa during apartheid and also then saw apartheid dismantled, saw South Africa change. I've never quite known myself how much weight to put on this interpretation, but it seems relevant, it seems interesting. It's certainly relevant that Teal, Musk and Sachs, who are three of the most significant figures in the Silicon Valley embrace of Trump, have this very, very distinctive political experience of watching South Africa's white minority move from being in control of the country to a frightened minority in the country.
- [28:20]
A
I mean, there is that element to a lot of these people, and the same thing with Silicon Valley people. Again, when you merge that with the ideas around Silicon Valley, which is highly male. Haile, we have all the answers. Why are these silly people, in our way? And with the South African thing, I don't know what happened there that created this group of people, but you could say that about people who come from Russia or China, or there's an element of a whole bunch of people who emigrated from India, so they bring with them whatever culture happened there. And in South Africa, you can go one of two ways, right? You can go the Athelfugar way, or you could go in this. This way of longing for past times, I guess, in some fashion.
- [29:25]
C
I'm Jonathan Swan. I'm a White House reporter for the New York Times. I have a pretty unsentimental view of what we do. Our job as reporters is to dig out information that powerful people don't want published, to take you into rooms that you would not otherwise have access to, to understand how some of the big decisions shaping our country are being made. And then painstakingly to go back and check with sources, check with public documents, make sure the information is correct. This is not something you can outsource to AI. There's no robot that can go and talk to someone who was in a situation room and find out what was really said in order to get actually original information that's not public, that requires human sources. We actually need journalists to do that. So, as you may have gathered from this long riff, I'm asking you to consider subscribing to the New York Times. Independent journalism is important, and without you, we simply can't do it.
- [30:28]
B
So Musk goes and buys Twitter. It's a sort of unusual acquisition. He tries to get out of it while it's happening, but he does buy it.
- [30:34]
A
He does.
- [30:35]
B
And he comes in and he immediately does this huge Cutting, just like slashing right through it. And people talk about this as headcount reduction. They talk about it as cutting waste. They talk about it as cutting bone. I think when you look back on it now, what it both was in reality and also. And you would know more about this than me, but what it becomes culturally in Silicon Valley is the reassertion of control.
- [30:58]
A
That's right.
- [30:58]
B
Of a CEO over an annoying and overly empowered, absolutely liberal employee base.
- [31:05]
A
They loved it. The CEOs loved it.
- [31:07]
B
Talk a little bit about. Not exactly just what he did, but what the cultural effect of what he did was on his cohort.
- [31:13]
A
Well, I think what was really interesting is a lot of these guys, you know, can I use this on the interchange? Have tiny dick energy. I don't know what else to say. They just. They wanna be big swinging dicks and they won't do it. Right. They won't go there. Cause they're worried about what people will say. Or everyone's sort of watching each other and this guy goes in and just does it like Silicon Valley. The employees run the show like they really do. They like to get their lunches, they like to get their cars, their dry cleaning. They like to speak up. And by the way, they started it like Google. Starting with having the employees talk back every Friday. What'd you think was gonna happen? Right. They're gonna. The kids start. Yeah.
- [31:48]
B
Facebook having a Friday meeting where Mark Zuckerberg answers employee questions.
- [31:51]
A
I hear you.
- [31:52]
B
And they all create the internal chat software.
- [31:55]
A
Right?
- [31:55]
B
Right. Like Slack and teams.
- [31:57]
A
Everybody has to point it out.
- [31:58]
B
Where it allows employees to be speaking in a way that they can sort of organize that speech even without unions.
- [32:03]
A
Right. They gave power to their employees. And I had a discussion, I don't think it was Mark, Where I was like, now they're talking back. I'm like, what did you think they were gonna do? You indulge children for long enough and give them sugar all day long, they're gonna become terrible people. Like, you know what I mean? And so that they were surprised by this is what happened when they created these cultures. I'm always surprised by. So they have all these employees that annoy them. So they let them say whatever they wanted. And then they said whatever they wanted. And then they were annoyed by them saying whatever they wanted. And they found it, you know, very hard to push back because talent is at a premium in Silicon Valley. So you have to kind of let everybody be themselves. And it got annoying for a lot of these people because they had effective control over Things. But with Musk, when he did it, you could see everybody in Silicon Valley, they already had this, oh, he gets to do that. I don't get to do that. I have to, like, listen to my diversity, equity, inclusion people. Like, ugh, I hate those people. Like, you know, but he doesn't have to. He can do whatever he wants. And when he did that and cut people, they wanted to do that too.
- [33:08]
B
This feels to me like part of the COVID era radicalization that happened to the Silicon Valley CEO class that, you know, something happening during COVID during the rise of various reckonings of MeToo, of black lives Matter. I really think it has a lot to do with the rise of Slack and teams and things like that. I think it's a very underrated dimension of what changed the relationship between the bosses and their employees. It feels to me like a lot of the CEOs just hated their employees. It would radicalize them, was that they had lost control of their companies and they wanted that control back. And that as much as anything feels to me like the theory Musk is importing now to the government. He's talked about cutting spending, cutting waste. What he's trying to get for Trump or for him is control, right?
- [33:55]
A
It's sort of the rid me of this annoying priest kind of thing. Like, rid me of these people again. It's like a king thing. The way they set up their companies is a king chip, right? Mark Zuckerberg has complete control. He can't be fired. He's there for life, dictator for life, or whatever the joke you want to make. And so they like that. But in practice, it doesn't work that way because he's got reporters annoying him like irritating reporters. He's got his staff. He's got to at least give a nod to diversity or else he gets shamed. And he doesn't have the fortitude that Musk has in that regard. And so they themselves are trying to assert themselves in sort of what they consider a man. This is the definition of what a man is. A lot of them were not considered manly when they were in high school or, you know, sort of Revenge of the Nerds kind of thing. So they are trying to hold on to all these kind of manly cosplaying, I guess. You know, with Mark, it's the stupid chain and the T shirt, which, good luck. It's fine. I think it looks ridiculous, but fine. He likes it. Or the mma. Like, I can feel like a man. Like, they hold on or I'm gonna hydrofoil or I'M gonna do or work out. I'm gonna show off my muscles. That's what Bezos is doing. Like, here's my my pretty fiance kind of thing. They're trying to sort of cosplay a version of a man that I think seems pathetic to me, but I think it gives them great comfort.
- [35:16]
B
One of the Rosetta stones to me of the intellectual shift happening among this class was. I forgot now exactly when this was, but when Musk and Zuckerberg were talking about having a fight in a cage.
- [35:30]
A
Right.
- [35:31]
B
And this has its own funny sub themes where. Where Zuckerberg is taking it all incredibly earnestly and Musk is clearly mocking him the whole time.
- [35:38]
A
Totally the whole time.
- [35:39]
B
And so there's like a whole dynamic where, like, they don't have the cage match, which Zuckerberg would win, but actually Musk wins because what he was doing was making fun of Mark Zuckerberg.
- [35:48]
A
They didn't like each other.
- [35:49]
B
Yeah. But then there's a third here. So there's an Allen and Company conference, one of these big CEO tech conferences, and Andreessen is asked about it, and he ends up sending out his answer on his substack. And he basically says, I think it's great if they fight because we've lost all the masculine virtues of the Greeks. And if it was good enough for the Greeks, it's good enough for us. And one of the things happening, it seems to me, in the right wing intellectual subculture these guys are increasingly part of, but also among them is a sense that the world has feminized and that the masculine virtues of aggression, of combat, of conflict, of daring, of risk of just making decisions and to hell with it has been diminished. And that the thing that is needed is some kind of correction, that modernity is going off the rails because we're becoming womanly and soft. And I guess this class of VCs and tech founders is gonna show us our way back to it.
- [36:43]
A
Well, they don't like women to start with. Come on. They don't like them to start with. So this is not a shouldn't be a surprise that don't like the ladies kind of thing.
- [36:51]
B
Well, they intellectualized it is what I think becomes interesting here.
- [36:54]
A
What's interesting about what you're saying. And it's absolutely true. Sorry, they don't have women in their midst. I wrote a piece once, say the men and no women of Facebook and Mark got hurt by it. And I was like, what? I'm just putting up pictures of your management. I don't know what to tell you. Like, you hired them. They're very fixated on what a man is and how to behave and what's really interesting, especially Marc Andreessen. I mean, if he could jog, like, 10ft, I'd be surprised, right? Talking about the manly virtues. Give me a break. I mean, when he said that, I'm like, I could beat him up in five seconds. Like, I don't even understand where this comes from. Now he's gonna try and challenge me to a fight, Whatever. So it's a concept of what a man is. That is not what a man is. But they've decided it is. Now, of all these people, Elon didn't cosplay a lot like that. Like, he didn't, except now he's starting to wear the cowboy hats and that whole nonsense that he's doing. But he actually didn't as much as they did. And now they sort of take all their cues from his aggression, which is kind of interesting.
- [37:51]
B
That was the thing I was gonna sort of get at with Zuckerberg, too, when I think back on that fight they were gonna have. And Zuckerberg for a minute seemed to himself as the Elon foil. You know, he challenged him to a fight. He was having threads, Elon had X. And now you see Zuckerberg copying him. I mean, the way he engages on threads is the way Elon engages on Twitter.
- [38:13]
A
Yeah. Zuckerberg is such a beta. He's such a beta. I love saying that. He probably drives him crazy.
- [38:18]
B
There is this deep way in which Musk seems to have reset the culture, or at least been the signal that allowed a lot of the people who weren't. Weren't quite ready to come out and say how they've been feeling themselves to move. He led a lot of the flood towards Trump of tech leaders and now is showing you can actually turn this into political power in a way that I think nobody quite realized you could do directly. I mean, Peter Thiel, I think, for better or worse, gets a lot of credit for. He supported Trump early. He made his bets, but Thiel didn't try to wield the power himself. Thiel makes bets and watches him pay off or not. But Musk is going in and showing, oh, it could just be you. You could not only have all this power as a technology CEO, you could be one of the most important celebrities in the world, and you could be functionally shadow president. Like, oh, you didn't figure this out? I figured it out.
- [39:06]
A
Yeah. Zuckerberg hid from the attention. Right. He liked the Acclaim, but he never liked the shit that went with it. And so that's why he didn't push all the way through. And that was interesting. And Musk does have this guts to do that. Like, I'm gonna do it no matter what. What if I get attacked? In fact, I eat my attackers for breakfast, right? I love my attack. Come and get me.
- [39:27]
B
Well, this is Trump's personality too. I mean, the thing they seem to me to be is temperamentally, actually quite similar. It takes a very unusual personality to be shameless at that level. The amount of genuine hatred you need to absorb, you know, there is a decision they both made that, you know, if you want to really wield power, you have to be willing to be hated. And one of the things most of us are not willing to do is to be truly hated. And most CEOs are not willing to be truly hated. It seems like bad business if nothing else. That disinhibition is to me central to their alliance.
- [39:57]
A
Well, they do care though. Underneath. Trump wants nothing more than have the New York Times love him. Like you can feel it, right? You know, the sense of victimhood.
- [40:06]
B
People say this, I don't buy it anymore. Maybe he did once. I don't buy it anymore.
- [40:09]
A
I do. I think they both care quite a bit of what people think. I think they care almost too much what people think. And so I think it fuels their rage in a lot of ways. I think there is a little piece of them that is never not gonna care about what people think of them. And they become more and more emboldened by that. It fuels, it's the center of their rocket fuel.
- [40:31]
B
I think there might be certainly truth to it as rocket fuel for them. I just think that at a certain point you lose the belief that these people are even friends you still wanna have. And that's I think what real radicalization is. Radicalization and I think often takes just the normal pluralistic give and take. We're all in this together. Off the table, it becomes an all out war. And I do think Trump, and in a different way, but in some ways a more, I think, intellectualized way. Musk now see this as all out war and you have to gain control. If you don't, I mean, he was on Rogan's show saying that there'd be no more elections if Trump didn't win this time. I mean, Musk has really gone into the civilizational battle, right. He clearly believes in some level of great replacement theory. He's now trying to get the far right AfD. Elected in Germany, try to get labor out of power in the uk. And this, to me, gets it a way that I'm curious if you think he's changed for a very long time. The line on Musk was that everything is backwards from his belief that eventually humanity needs to be a interplanetary species.
- [41:35]
A
Well, look at all his children. He manifests himself by having so many children and seemingly not spending time with them, except for one. He wants to have children, not necessarily be a parent, which I think is an interesting thing to plumb at some point.
- [41:49]
B
But so what is a goal that now motivates him? Do you really believe it's still the interplanetary thing, or is it a view that these countries are losing their cultures, and if you lose those cultures, then everything is lost?
- [41:59]
A
I do think it does manifest from the need to get off this planet. I do. That is the one consistent thing since I managed, which is this idea that civilization is doomed and therefore we need to get off this planet. I think at their heart, they do believe the version of themselves is the greatest version of man, which would be a white guy supreme kind of thing. I think they actually believe that at their heart. And so you're gonna see that manifested in these statements that he makes all the time, which are very clearly, we need. I forget what he said, but essentially we need more South Africans here in this country or something like that. And he's always sort of pulling in that direction. I have never heard him express any kind of what I would consider. I've heard different CEOs express racism. His is a different kind. It's more around social engineering and the idea of that the best people are being replaced. I think that's really where he lives, which is also racist, of course.
- [42:58]
B
So to you, the synthesis of these positions is that Musk is still motivated by the desire to become interplanetary, but he just believes that we are corroding the civilizational virtues and genius that you would need to do that with DEI and the Woke Mind virus.
- [43:15]
A
And everything is in the way of our getting somewhere else because the lesser people are in charge, or the lesser people. He does talk about this a lot. At one point, he was tweeting about Caesarean sections. Right. Did you see that tweet where he said, if you have a caesarean, you have a better brain because your brain comes out better because you're not going through the vaginal canal? This whole thing he was talking about. And I've had a Caesarean, so I sort of was like, sit down, sir. You don't know what you're talking about. But everyone sort of passed people by. But I was like, oh, he thinks you have to preserve the. Like he's sort of eugenics almost like, you know what I mean? It was such a weird thing for him to go down that avenue. But he has these theories about human brains and development. Obviously he's involved with neurological. So he's always been interested in the idea of machine people merging together. That's certainly an area that hasn't been plumbed enough, his neuralink stuff.
- [44:11]
B
And so if you put all this together and bring it back to the government, it sounds to me like if I pull out what you're saying here, what you have is someone who, in order for humanity to achieve its long term goals, you need people like Elon Musk in control of a federal government that is responsive to people like Elon Musk, purged of the forces that were not responsive, that slow down. A person like Elon Musk in a polity that isn't infected by these modern progressive ideas of equity, of consensus, of doing all these things that are just slow and burdensome and regulatory and soft and don't allow for the risk and the daring allow you to blow up 90 rocks. Is that your view of the put it all together, that he's trying to functionally make the federal government something that can be effectively controlled by people like him to get to the goals he wants to get to?
- [45:06]
A
Yeah, I think he thinks they're in the way. This goes back to Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, everyone's like, oh, they wanna reform it. I go, no, no, no, they want to burn it down and start again. If you spend time reading Peter Thiel, that is what he's saying. Democracy doesn't work. It doesn't work. We're gonna start with something else. And that is sort of the ethos of, of move fast and break things, right? Which is a software term they want to break. They don't want to build, they want to break. And they can't build until you break. And that's disruption. Think of all the words they use. It's all about destruction. And it's not creative destruction, it's let's wipe the slate clean and then we will build the civilization we want. And let us show you the way of how we can get back to glory kind of thing. And it's just that it's that theory, but they sort of burnish it with this techno utopianism that is really techno authoritarianism. If you break it down, that they know best and that if we just listen to them, the world will be a better place for everybody.
- [46:33]
B
To try to be generous to it. As a theory of governmental reform, which I know you like to do that I try.
- [46:40]
A
I think democracies work pretty fucking well. But go ahead.
- [46:43]
B
So Musk said regulations basically should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. If it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in. And so. So if you take the view that we have a long time stable government, there's a lot of crust, a lot of bureaucracy, that the theory here, which I guess is also theory from Twitter, is like, yes, you rid it, you turn things off, you turn them back on, you cut hugely. And if it's a problem, then you go fix a problem later. But better to cut deeper and then be able to rebuild in a cleaner way than to cut not deep enough to only get a quarter loaf. And politics does not go that far in reform reform. It's very, very hard to reform institutions. And there are real problems from that. I mean, San Francisco works quite poorly. Much of the federal government leaves something to be desired. So is there a case to be made here for muskism? That he is doing what normal political reformers won't do and taking risk in order to do it, but this is actually the only way to actually create a federal bureaucracy that is not quite so sclerotic?
- [47:52]
A
No, I think it's not. Not at all. I think I'm a reform person. Right. Obviously everything's not gonna happen at once. There is an ease to tearing it all down, isn't there? And it has to be a willingness to sacrifice people. Right? We're gonna sacrifice this group of people, these young women, these young, they don't care about that. And one of the things I say over and over again, they're like, I have a lot of people like, how can they do this? How can they do this? I'm like, they don't care. Care. They don't care for you. They don't think about you. You're nothing. And I remember one time, Musk was the earliest person to talk to me about AI. AI has been around forever, but he was really concerned about the impact of AI on humanity. That was another thing. He was the first person to raise those alarms to me at least when he started OpenAI with Sam and the rest of them. First he was like, AI is going to kill us. It's going to the Terminator idea. It's going to become self aware and 20 whatever and then it's going to turn around and bomb us and kill us and start. And we gotta stop that. That was his theory. Next time I saw him, I thought he came up with a much more sophisticated idea of it, which was, they're not gonna kill us. They're gonna treat us like house cats. We're house cats, and they're fine with us here, and they're gonna build everything around us, but we're not in danger. We're in danger in the way house cats are. As long as they like house cats, we're fine. Like, they don't think of us as anything more. Then the next time I saw him, he had evolved into this idea that AI was more like building highways the way we build highways across the country. And humanity is a bunch of anthills. And we go across anthills without thinking. When we're building roads, we don't know that the anthills were there. We just do it. I thought the progression was really interesting. To me that that's how he was looking at it. And to me, that's how he. I thought he was expressing how he operates. These things are anthills. I don't have to think about them because we never think about them. And so to me, that progression of the first one cares about what happens to humanity, the last one doesn't.
- [49:51]
B
I like that progression of metaphors because very classically, what you put into the metaphor reveals what you can see and not see out of the metaphor. And I think the dominant comparison for what Musk is doing is Twitter, where he came in and used, in some ways, very similar playbook to cut through it and take control of it. But during that period, Twitter broke down terribly, its advertising collapsed. It's still a much jankier platform than it used to be. I mean, it has things it didn't have before, Grok, but the search doesn't work. One thing that just strikes me when I look at what Trump is outsourcing to Musk right now is I wonder if they have really thought about the risk they're taking on. Because I've never seen an administration come in and so completely own everything bad that might happen that the federal government does or is supposed to regulate in the coming years. If you imagine something like the terrible plane crash that happens, happened just recently, happening in a year when pushed retirements have come through the FAA and Musk had already pushed the administrator of the FAA to be on leave or resign, you would get a lot more blame for that. But bad things happen all the Time that the federal government is supposed to stop financial crises, and on and on and on. They're coming with this axe to the government, pushing indiscriminate resignations, reassigning people, pushing out very talented career staff. Anything that goes wrong, they are truly going to own.
- [51:22]
A
Yes, but they won't. They will not. They will say, it is not them. It was. We're cleaning up from the previous. Right. They will not take control because 1. Ezra, you think they care about consequences? One of the messages in my memoir.
- [51:35]
B
Was, I think they care about power.
- [51:36]
A
They don't care about the consequences of damage. They do not care. They don't anticipate it. You're right about Twitter. It's a lesser business. The only way he's getting advertised is by threatening them. Like, they're just doing these lawsuits. And of course these advertisers are gonna go back just to acquiesce to him, right? Yeah.
- [51:51]
B
I mean, now he has power, right?
- [51:53]
A
Not a better business. Tesla's not a better business than what it was because they haven't innovated the cars. That stock may be going up, but the sales are going down because the cars aren't as good. They just aren't. So he doesn't care about the actual thing. These people don't care about the actual thing. They care about laying waste to it. And then we'll build something better. But I don't know what they're gonna build better if you press them. And a lot of these, like, same thing with the media that goes with it. It's never about solutions, is it? It's about how everything sucks and we have to get rid of it. They never tell you what their replacement is for any of it, because they don't have a theory of building, they have a theory of destruction. And you know, Trump just with the water thing, he just like, we gotta get the water flow. What a disaster. That was what he just did, like, in California. He's wasting.
- [52:40]
B
Opening reservoirs for no reason to fight fires.
- [52:43]
A
No reason. And then going on. And then the whole group of. Mm, sir, well done. I'm like, are you fucking. Like, who is not standing there among the media going, are you fucking kidding me with this? Like, not going well, sir. People say, I'd be like, that's why they don't let me in the White House. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? That was a disaster. Like, what you just did, you idiot.
- [53:02]
B
I think back to Twitter on the control question, because Musk buys Twitter, he breaks a lot of Twitter he breaks the business of Twitter. Clearly, he's overpaying at $44 billion. And so I would have told you, you a year ago, 18 months ago, that didn't work out. But what he did actually do is he made Twitter a channel for him personally.
- [53:24]
A
That's right.
- [53:25]
B
And he turned all of its attention and influence into something he could control. And I don't know if the power he's getting out of that or will get out of that is worth $44 billion. I don't think it's exactly the way to measure it, but I actually think it's worth more than that. I don't think it would be possible for Musk to play this role in both domestic and now international politics if he didn't do that. We don't know how to value attention enough.
- [53:51]
A
It's the best investment he made, except for investing In Trump, that 280 million, let me tell you, the only person, when he bought it, we were all sort of like, what in the world? Why is he paying so much? What an idiot. Right? Everybody was saying that that was sort of.
- [54:03]
B
Well, he was, too. He tried to get out of it on the View, that it was overvalued.
- [54:05]
A
He tried to get out of it. He thought he was stupid because he wasn't anticipating what he could use it for. Right. He didn't realize he had a really big gun there. Right. He thought it was a knife or whatever. The only person who called me was Mark Cuban. And he says, kerry, he's not buying it. Maybe he doesn't know he's doing this, but when he goes in a room internationally as the head of Tesla or Starlink, I mean, he gets a meeting just like the head of GM or Lockheed gets, right? And world leaders, et cetera. When he goes in, as the owner of Twitter, he has enormous power globally. From an influence point of view, he goes, this is not a US play. This is a global play. And I was like, huh? I think mark Newton was 100% right. He bought it and it gave him. He's the Twitter guy. And also Tesla and also. But he gets an. No one else has that, right? And maybe back in the day, Rupert Murdoch. Right, I guess. And that's what he's done. But like, bigger, better, stronger, more influential. Rupert Murdoch would never think of sitting with Trump cutting this stuff.
- [55:04]
B
Murdoch didn't want to be the main character of his own platform, but he.
- [55:07]
A
Is kind of Rupert Murdoch now. Right, but except Rupert Murdoch, who likes to do shit.
- [55:12]
B
I've said the same thing. I Think it's the absolutely correct comparison. But that, I think, then brings us to the government, which is, he may not know what he wants to build after, but what I think that at least the Twitter experience probably taught him is if you break it, you can control it, you can make it a vehicle for you, right? And if it's filled with the old people who were in it and they're unafraid and they have power and there are power centers, then you're opposed. I don't know if even he knows what he wants to do with the government, but the degree to which he wants everybody to see that it is him doing it. I thought it was so telling that in the email they sent out to federal employees trying to tell them you could get money and do nothing until September if you would just retire that. He gave it the same subject line as the email I sent out to Twitter employees during that buyout. He wanted everybody to know it was him, right? He wants to be the main character of the whole thing. As you said at the beginning.
- [56:05]
A
You said that, right? Thank God you said that. Because all the media's like, look at this interesting thing. I'm like, he wants you to know it's a signature. It's me, Fredo. I know it was you, Fredo. He totally wanted people. Everything he does, he wants you to know because, again, he is a desperate attention sponge. And he just needs constant, constant. Why would you stay up at night talking to people, people named Cat Turd? Why? Why? Like, you know, because you have a desperately empty hole in the center of your life that you can never fill, right? It's the bottom of bottomless well, this center of need to be loved or. And I hate to break it down like that because I'm not a psychologist, but, boy, does he have a big old hole right in the center of himself. And so what I think is very telling about both of these people is they do not have solutions. They only tell us what the problem is, and they don't have a vision. Even Ronald Reagan had a vision like they all have. What is your vision? What do you want to make except, get out of my way and let me do what I want to do? That's really the vision that I can tell. I haven't heard what they want to make at all.
- [57:09]
B
You know, there's this idea of the sin eater. No, in fantasy novels, I forget exactly where it comes from. But the character that consumes sin and then can be purged, right? You can purge that figure, and then the sins are gone. It's a sort of sacrificial character.
- [57:23]
A
It's Jesus, I think.
- [57:24]
B
And in a way, Musk. I wonder a bit about that in terms of the pain of the administrative war that Trump and the people around him wanted to do. I mean, when I think about when this starts to go bad, assuming this starts to go bad, Musk taking so much credit for it all makes him so usefully sacrificial. When the people around Musk who are more careful and quiet, the Susie Wiles is the Russ votes, the rest of them who, you know are not against.
- [57:54]
A
This agenda, have you noticed they're all leaking. We don't have control of him.
- [57:57]
B
Yeah, there's a lot of leaking already that we can't control Musk, such that the moment he becomes more liability than asset, you can get rid of him. He's like, well, he went too far, right? Elon Musk got out of control. That wasn't us. I don't know that it happens. And he has leverage he can bring to a fight like that, but it doesn't seem impossible that it happens. And you can see people setting up that escape route as we speak.
- [58:22]
A
Utterly. Trump's life is full of those people. And now he's got the greatest one ever. Michael Cohen, was that like the fixer? Right. So there's always a fixer in Trump's life who does these things, who's willing to go to the mat for the boss, which he likes to be called, apparently. So Musk is that writ large. It's just that he's much more protected. Cause he's so wealthy. His. So much means that he almost is more powerful than. He's not a minion. He's like a super minion or something.
- [58:49]
B
How real do you think the affection between the two of them is?
- [58:53]
A
Donald Trump is like. He has, what, three emotions? Abc? I don't think he's very complex in that regard. I did think they were gonna fight. And I know he's irritating to Trump. You hear that from a lot of people, and I think it's absolutely true. He probably is irritating. At the same time, Trump loves money. So really that's at the heart of him. I think Donald Trump finds him useful. And he is useful to Donald Trump, he's a useful junkyard dog. And he has a lot of money. So if he has a cudgel against these senators, he's going to give me money to take you out. Like, I've got a bank, a bank that never ends, essentially. He also knows he needs him to hold on to power. Because what does it look like when they fight? What does that look like? You don't want Elon Musk outside the tent. That's a really bad place for Elon Musk to be. And angel angry because he's shown he has an ability to fight back at people. So ultimately, it could go on for a while and he could do more and more outlandish things and behave in more and more outlandish ways. Trump has an endless capacity for, oh, did he say a racist thing? I don't care. So I think it could go on for a very, very long time.
- [60:01]
B
I've been struck, though, to see Trump already trying to make clear that Elon is under his control. He said, quote, elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval, and we'll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won't. And then there's this endless leaking from inside the administration that nobody's actually in control of him. Trump is not paying attention to what he's doing. And I sort of think both things are actually true, that Trump could say no to him, but actually Trump doesn't care. And so the danger for both of them, in a strange way, is that Musk, who is hyper empowered and has a very, very, almost endless appetite for risk, takes a risk that blows up for all of them.
- [60:40]
A
What could that be? What does he detonate? A nuclear bomb?
- [60:44]
B
You break the government and things are gonna break. I mean, you have to have a very. I'm not saying you do, but you have to have a very dim view of government to believe that if you get rid of this many talented people in it, that when bad things begin to happen in the world, and they happen constantly, I mean, there was a pandemic in his first term, but Trump in his first term had this real interesting capacity, capacity to always seem like he was outside of the state that he, in theory ran. He spoke as if he was up in the balcony jeering at the opera. He was watching. And that always gave him this strange ability to separate himself from how a government that he didn't like worked. That was the whole political utility of the deep state. But this, they've torched that. I mean, I know they could. They might still try to claim it, but when you do this kind of bulldozer tactic and it's this public and you are absorbing all this risk and pushing these people out, then when things break and people go back and they look and they say, well, a bunch of the people here, they actually Took the buyout, they took your fork in the road, Elon, I could be wrong. It could all work out great for them, but they are taking a lot of risks.
- [61:52]
A
You see, you're operating on the other. They care about the pain. They don't care. They won't take responsibility for it. Have you heard Mark Zuckerberg take responsibility for any of the problems.
- [62:01]
B
I think Trump cares, cares about Payne, though. I mean, look at how quickly he backed off on his tariffs of Canada and Mexico when the markets began to move. Right? You can lose midterm elections really badly and then all of a sudden the investigations are coming for you.
- [62:12]
A
Right? Which is probably what will happen. That's the likeliest scenario here. I mean, one of the things that he's got to keep Musk around for that is the money on these things, to manipulate things, to really flood the zone with all kinds of money and efforts to win that midterms. But again, they don't care. He has done the damage as long as he destroys it and you can't come back is what they're doing. In Musk's mind, my guess is that he thinks this is the only way to do it, is to get rid of everything. They're hoping you focus so much on the destruction that you're not gonna notice you're living in a destroyed place. And I know you think there's bigger implications, but they'll be so all over the place, it'll be hard to figure out what actually has been destroyed or to feel a sense of anger. What's gonna happen is people are gonna feel a sense of just nihilism, right? I think that's what's gonna happen.
- [63:01]
B
I mean, I do think that's often the emotion that they are attempting to provoke. I wanna ask you before we end a question about the broader Silicon Valley tech culture here. You've had this big almost herd like movement towards this. I forgot what you called it, a techno. A techno authoritarianism.
- [63:19]
A
Authoritarianism, yeah.
- [63:20]
B
And it's been so fast and so intense among the leaders, the sort of cultural leaders of Silicon Valley, the people with the biggest social media accounts, and they're all at the Trump inauguration. Do you see a counterforce when you think of the cultural currents there? Is it all just moving this direction? Are the employees moving this direction? Are the people coming up? What is the contrarian bet in terms of this intellectual culture, which, I mean, was very different 10 years ago than where it is now, when everybody was.
- [63:49]
A
Pro Obama, they weren't pro Biden. I can tell you that they were.
- [63:52]
B
Not pro Biden and they hated Donald Trump in 2016, with the exception of Thiel. So it moves very fast. And so whenever it moves as fast and as far as it has now, it sort of makes me wonder where it's going to be in four years. I'm curious if you have a sense of who you're watching as signals of that.
- [64:05]
A
There's a few people. Reid Hoffman was just on the podcast this week. I sense fear in him. He funded the E. Jean Carroll thing. He's a very lovely person and he's very even handed all the time, almost to a fault. I don't think he's going to be as aggressive and he certainly was, but he's got to be thinking, what do I do? I'm very exposed. You have a marquee Cuban who I think presents a different alternate. He claims to me he doesn't wanna run for president. I think he has a real opening of like, oh, come on, this is not the way we are. I don't think everyone's moved there. I think there's these loudmouths like Musk and David Sachs and that gang, and even Peter's not that loudmouth these days, which is interesting, I find interesting. But you have the loudmouths. But I don't think everyone is on this ticket. If you noticed, you didn't see Tim Cook in the front row with the greatest feat of engineering in history. Was somehow he didn't have to be in that picture. I have never thought Silicon Valley was liberal. I thought they were utilitarian, I guess. I thought they sort of were tolerant socially, but didn't really care, didn't think about it much. I think these people just want to do their business. I don't think they support Trump. I think they. It's like a vig, right? Whether you're Bob Iger or whether you're anybody, you got to pay the vig or you don't have a choice Right now. I don't think there's a deep well of support for Trump. I think it's just there's a bunch of loud mouse that have that and everyone else just shakes their head for this. So when that's the case, there tends to be a countervailing force of these guys are shakedown artists, right? When, say, as you say, disaster will come and this will be a big fucking mess, they will line up in that direction because it's good for them and for their shareholders. So whatever it takes for shareholders to do better. If Trump tanks the stock market If Trump tanks this, they'll be on the opposite side instantly because they have no real value values. They just don't. Elon has more values than most of them in a weird way, even though they're warped and twisted. So I think they'll just go whatever way the financial markets go. That's my feeling.
- [66:04]
B
I think that's a good place to end, always. Our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?
- [66:08]
A
Oh, God. Interesting. I. I can't. One of them, I. I should. I can't say. Well, there's a memoir coming out from a very well known media person that once it publishes, you should read. I'm reading it right now and I can't say who it is because he gave it to me on the sly. I think it's wonderful. I love the book north woods by Daniel Mason, which came out last year, which is about a house, the history of a house and the people who lived in it. And it's haunting me. I think it's the most beautiful book. And I love Daniel Mason. I'm reading the Piano Tuner right now. I'm reading all his stuff. But this book, it's about one of the things that comforts me in this very difficult time. You know, I have four kids, I'm a gay person. It's nerve wracking right now. I thought this was all over and here we are again. But it gives me comfort that we're all being dead someday. I know it sounds crazy, but life goes on over the period. And so I really like that book. And then I recently interviewed him and I think he's terrific. Tim Snyder, I think he's a really important person. Talking about where tyranny goes and stuff like that. I read a lot more nonfiction. I should read more fiction. And I'm sorry, I'm gonna give one more. Geraldine Brooks, who is a wonderful writer. She, I think is the Pulitzer or whatever. Her book, she's mostly done fiction. She's written a book about the death of her husband that is incredible. Tony Horowitz, who is a friend of mine. Geraldine's a friend of mine. He wrote Confederates in the Attic. And it's a beautiful rumination on mortality and history. I don't know. Just a wonderful book.
- [67:36]
B
K. Swisher, thank you very much.
- [67:38]
A
Okay, good.
- [67:59]
B
This episode of the Ezra Klein show is produced by Elias isquith and Jack McCordick. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. We have original Music by Pat McCusker, Audience Strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.